Baremetal network isolation for cloud providers with OVN on DPUs#

Adrian Chiris (NVIDIA), Mael Kimmerlin (NVIDIA), Tarek Abu-Hariri (NVIDIA)

• Why: Secure multi-tenancy for bare-metal cloud nodes without per-tenant switch configuration — the DPU is the enforcement point a tenant cannot reach even with privileged host processes. Combines the PM's physical DC and network security interests, and it ships real throughput numbers.
• What: OVN/OVS offloaded to BlueField-3 and run in a separate trust domain under cloud-admin control; tenant VPCs (bridged L2 networks with DHCP, masquerade, external routing, floating-IP-class features) enforced transparently to the host, with declarative Kubernetes CRDs (DPUVPC, DPUVirtualNetwork, DPUServiceInterface) mapping bare-metal machines to tenants dynamically. Test results: node-to-node RoCE with Geneve encapsulation on BF3 with 2×200Gb/s links — 191.9 Gb/s without ECMP, 383 Gb/s with ECMP (BGP to an L3 ToR, single hop, OVS-based HBN router).
• How: An OVN logical structure modeled on OVN-Kubernetes, optimized for bandwidth and few hops; isolation at the PF/VF level; ECMP via BGP; HBN (host-based networking) OVS router on the DPU.
• Where applicable: NVIDIA BlueField-3-specific. Roadmap includes OVN-IC, BGP-EVPN integration (replacing the external router with OVN BGP), SFC, and nested OVNs; the multi-tenancy API is currently admin-only. Real numbers, but from the vendor's own testbed.